Tag Archives: D. H. Lawrence

Max Ernst, The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Painter, 1926

3,285 words

Trans. G. A. Malvicini

One of the most indicative signs of the influence of the regressive processes that we have described in the preceding pages of this book [L’Arco e la Clava] with regard to customs and tastes, is the enjoyment of vulgarity, with its more or less subconscious undercurrent of pleasure taken in degradation and self-contamination. Related to it are the various expressions of a tendency towards deformation and a taste for the ugly and the base. A few observations with regard to this matter will perhaps not be devoid of interest.

I turn, finally, to a different Indo-European tradition, that of German Idealism of the 19th century. I include this material so as to show the perennial character of Indo-European thought. One could argue that the entire history of Western (and Indian) philosophy is a long, unconscious attempt to recollect the wisdom known “directly” by our Indo-European ancestors. Read more …

The following text is a transcript by V. S. of Jonathan Bowden’s lecture on Wyndham Lewis which was delivered to the 8th New Right meeting in London on May 28, 2006. There are a number of passages marked unintelligible. These passages appear in the recording at 4:00, 34:21, 40:12, 41:52, and 46:28. (You can listen to the lecture using the player below or by downloading the lecture.) If you can understand these words, please post a comment below.

In an earlier essay, I shared ten aphorisms from “my code.” In case you missed that essay, I will just say that a few years ago I decided to establish a code to live by. Like most of the things I do, this turned into a major project and I wound up gathering nuggets of “practical knowledge” from all manner of sources: Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, the Eddas and Sagas, medieval Chivalry, Japanese Bushido, Tyler Durden, G. I. Gurdjieff, and even Indian Shaivism. Read more …

They were true idealists, from New England. But that is some time ago: before the War. Several years before the War they met and married; he a tall, keen-eyed young man from Connecticut, she a smallish, demure, Puritan-looking young woman from Massachusetts. Read more …

In his essay “Why the Novel Matters,” Lawrence writes, “To the scientist, I am dead. He puts under the microscope a dead bit of me, and calls it me. He takes me to pieces, and says first one piece, and then another piece, is me.”[1] This is unfortunate because, as Lawrence never tires of repeating, “life, and life only, is the clue to the universe.”[2]

What the lack of any national purpose is doing to America as a nation is painfully evident to everyone willing to see. It may be less evident, however, what the lack of a meaningful purpose in life is doing to millions of the best men and women of our race as individuals. That is because most of these believe, mistakenly, that they do have purpose in their lives.

D. H. Lawrence argues that through the sex act, individuals participate in some kind of mysterious power running through nature. But does this momentary experience have any kind of long-term effect on them? Lawrence directly addresses this question. When the sex act is over, he writes, “The two individuals are separate again. But are they as they were before? Is the air the same after a thunderstorm as before? No. The air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness. Read more …

D. H. Lawrence believed in the reality of evil, but he believed that its source lay in the human soul. “Abstraction is the only evil,” he wrote.[1] By abstraction he does not refer to the process of making generalizations or forming concepts. Instead, he means the tendency of human beings to abstract themselves from feeling, from intuition, from nature, and from the present. Abstraction is fundamentally evil, for Lawrence, because it makes most of humanity’s crimes possible. Read more …

“We are now in the last stages of idealism,” Lawrence writes in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, and he goes on to claim that psychoanalysis is conducting us through those last stages.[1] Furthermore, he also tells us that idealism is “the one besetting sin of the human race.”[2] What does Lawrence mean by idealism, and why is he so opposed to it?

Without question, the most unusual books D. H. Lawrence ever produced were his two “psychological” works: Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and, especially, Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). These texts are absolutely crucial for understanding Lawrence, for in them he sets forth an entire philosophy.

“A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.” Carl Jung was apparently besotted with this stanza from Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Read more …

How do you define masculinity? If you listen to today’s feminist-approved “authorities” on the subject you will be told either that masculinity means nothing at all — that it is “constructed” differently from place to place or time to time — or you will be told that masculinity is now being “redefined.” Read more …

A. R. D. Fairburn was born on February 2, 1904. Fairburn was a poet, painter, critic, essayist, and advocate of Social Credit, New Zealand Nationalism, and organic farming. In commemoration,we are publishing the following expanded version of Kerry Bolton’s essay on Fairburn. To read Fairburn’s magnificent poem “Dominion,” click here. Read more …

She was speaking to me and my mother. The restaurant was the Olive Garden, and it was in the mid-1990s. I felt affronted on two levels. First, it was far too informal a way to refer to patrons; unforgivably familiar, really. Second, I was not there with one of my “guy” friends at all. I was there with my grey-haired, sixty-something year-old mother. Read more …